Above: Stamp honoring the Emancipation Proclamation, 1963; below: design
unveiling at White House with President John F. Kennedy

CBS program titles: Alfred Hitchcock
Presents and The Web

Cartoon, The New Yorker, December 8, 1945

Batten, Barton, Dustine & Osborn, Inc. Office Telephone Directory

CBS program titles: Undercurrent and Studio One Summer Theatre

CBS program titles: Search for Tomorrow and Brotherhood Week

In 1945, before Jackie Robinson played Major League baseball, or
Marian Anderson sang at the Metropolitan Opera, Georg Olden, the
grandson of a slave, took a job with CBS. There, as head of the
network's division of on-air promotions at the dawn of television,
Olden pioneered the field of broadcast graphics. Working under
CBS's art director, William Golden, he supervised the identities of
programs such as I Love Lucy, Lassie and
Gunsmoke; helped produce the vote-tallying scoreboard for
the first televised presidential election returns (the 1952 race
between Dwight D. Eisenhower and Adlai E. Stevenson); and
collaborated with esteemed artists and designers, including David
Stone Martin, Ed Benguiat, Alex Steinweiss and Bob Gill.

Olden was widely celebrated in his day. The 1981 reference book
250 Years of Afro-American Art: An Annotated Bibliography
notes that between 1951 and 1960—the year Olden left CBS to work in
advertising—his name appeared 108 times in Graphis and Art
Directors Club annuals. By 1970 he had won seven Clio awards and
had even designed the Clio statuette in 1962, a figure inspired by
Brancusi's Bird in Space sculpture. Olden was respected
not only for helping to usher TV from a fledgling industry into a
golden age, but also for serving as a model for black America.
Ebony magazine profiled him several times in the 1950s and
'60s as one who had grasped the opportunities offered by a new
communications medium and risen to an executive rank. But it was
far from easy. In 1954, Ebony reported that of the 72,400
people employed full-time in television, fewer than 200 were black.
The jobs included “print-machine operator” and “wardrobe mistress.”
“Acceptance is a matter of talent,” Olden told the magazine in
1963. “In my work I've never felt like a Negro. Maybe I've been
lucky.”

By all accounts, Olden was endowed with many graces. Nina
Blanchard, the writer of a 1965 Elegant magazine profile,
observed that he was “awesomely handsome, extremely male, and very
polite, all of which can be momentarily unsettling for a woman
attempting to conduct a serious interview.” Arthur Young, a college
classmate, remembered Olden's “thriving wit and sense of humor.”
Eve Lee, Olden's niece, who is a professor of German at the
University of Southern California, recalled, “I never saw him
angry; I never saw him in a bad mood. Even when my brother
[Everett] was teasing him, he just laughed it off.” The advertising
luminary George Lois, who worked at CBS in the 1950s, also
remembered Olden as someone who could take a joke: “I would say,
'Georg, you're one letter away from greatness!'”

Olden appeared to have settled on the unusual spelling of his
first name when he was in his early twenties and occasionally sold
cartoons to The New Yorker. “You have to do something to
attract the attention of the magazine editors,” he later told
Advertising Age in 1963. He was born George Elliott Olden
in Birmingham, Alabama, on November 13, 1920, the son of a Baptist
minister whose own father had escaped slavery and fought in a black
regiment of the Union Army during the Civil War. Olden's mother, a
New Orleans beauty from whom he apparently inherited his much
admired looks, was a classically trained singer. Advised to abandon
her husband for an operatic career, Olden's mother instead
performed at concerts and recitals around Washington, D.C., where
the couple eventually settled with Georg and his older siblings,
James Clarence and Sylvia. (The latter, under her married name,
Sylvia Olden Lee, grew up to be a renowned musician and teacher.
She was the first person of color to work at the Metropolitan
Opera, where she coached many notable divas and has been credited
with helping to bring about the groundbreaking appearances of both
Marian Anderson and the baritone Robert McFerrin, Sr.)

Olden attended Dunbar High School in D.C. and nearby Virginia
State College before dropping out shortly after Pearl Harbor to
work as a graphic designer for the Office of Strategic Services,
forerunner of the CIA. When the war ended in 1945, his OSS
supervisor recommended him to the agency's communications director,
Colonel Lawrence W. Lowman, who in civilian life was vice president
of CBS's TV division. From a one-man operation involved with six
programs a week, Olden eventually headed a staff of 14 in charge of
60 weekly shows. When he joined the network in 1945, there were
16,000 TV sets in the entire U.S. By the time he left in 1960,
there were 85 million sets, one for every two Americans.

Olden might have rested comfortably at CBS, but he soldiered on
in corporate America, surmounting obstacles that barred many other
people of color from advancement, despite the efforts of the civil
rights movement. In 1960, he took a job as television group art
director at the advertising agency BBDO. Ebony magazine
photographed him in his windowed office on Madison Avenue and
described him admiringly as “an artist, a dreamer, a designer, a
thinker and a huckster.” In 1963, he joined an elite department
within the ad agency McCann-Erickson. That year, he became the
first African American to design a postage stamp—a broken chain
commemorating the 100th anniversary of the Emancipation
Proclamation. At a White House ceremony with Olden in attendance,
President John F. Kennedy praised the stamp as “a reminder of the
extraordinary actions in the past as well as the business of the
future.”

Georg Olden helped to ensure that future by inspiring other
designers of color. Lowell Thompson, Michele Y. Washington and
Frank Briggs are contemporary practitioners who have each claimed
him as an inspiration and worked to bring his contributions to
light. So it is infinitely regrettable that he soon parted company
with the industries within which he blazed such notable trails.
Olden died in Los Angeles in 1975, at the age of 54. In a
posthumous edition of Who's Who, he supplied his own
unconscious epitaph: “As the first black American to achieve an
executive position with a major corporation, my goal was the same
as that of Jackie Robinson in baseball: to achieve maximum respect
and recognition by my peers, the industry and the public, thereby
hopefully expanding acceptance of, and opportunities for, future
black Americans in business.”

Olden succeeded in his ambitions. For the design field there is
no higher symbol of respect and recognition than the AIGA Medal.
And today there are African Americans running corporations such as
Time Warner, Merrill Lynch and American Express. He left this world
prematurely, but Olden is survived by his legacy of creative and
professional accomplishment that deserves to be treasured.